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I was talking about this site not the world. We are non-mindkilled on many things that are incredibly political in the wider world. One of the few things we are mindkilled and tribal about is Feminism/PUA/Gender relations. I want to make sure economics doesn't join it.
I think it would be hard to forget considering 2/3s of LW are either "liberal" or "socialist". While we have extremely high quality thinkers with right wing ideas and they are a key feature of our community they are still a minority (Vladimir_M for example) so most readers are if anything probably biased against such ideas. But I think I see your point when it comes to economics in particular since we have many "libertarians" and our "liberals" being mostly American are likely more pro-free market than is the center in Europe let alone say some Third World countries.
There is this strange relationship between politics, mindkilling, and education...
When a topic becomes political, people get mindkilled about it. Then they tell many stupid things. And the sane person, who wants to avoid discussing with idiots or even the risk of being pattern-matched as one of the idiots, avoids the topic. But if sane people avoid the topic, all information is replaced by noise. And if people are uneducated about the topic, but they still think parroting a phrase of their leader makes them smart, of course politicians will use the topic for their advantage.
You cannot use "2+2=4" as your party banner, if everyone agrees with that. And you also cannot use "2+2=5" as your party banner, if everyone disagrees with that. But you can use "evolution" or "free market", because people are divided about this topics, because many of them just lack the basic knowledge. Of course by using these topics as party banners, the education becomes more difficult; or more precisely it becomes trivially easy to label people as "parrotting their party line" even in those situations where they just honestly evaluate the evidence. Also, such environment makes honestly evaluating the evidence more difficult for humans.
Sometimes I feel like smart people avoiding the mindkilling topics indirectly contribute to the topics being mindkilling, by leaving the politicians of various kinds unopposed. Though of course I understand the motive to avoid toxic things. Also I understand that there are too many things fucked up with this world, and one has to pick their battles. But we really should educate people at least about the basic, easiest to understand stuff. Because many of them didn't hear even some trivial ideas; or they heard them once and then forgot.
Raising the sanity waterline while avoiding sensitive topics -- maybe it's like trying to clean your room without entering the room.
Let's just take each topic as far as we have solid evidence. Just like there is no "conservative" or "liberal" position on whether 2+2=4, we could try to see how far this neutral region of knowledge can go.
Evolution is true, in the sense that there is overwhelming evidence that men evolved from apes, and that likenesses between kinds is a literal family resemblance, the result of ancestral shared blood or sap. "Evolution" is untrue, in that use of the word "evolution" tends to be almost perfectly correlated with distaste for the implications of Darwinism, and complete disbelief in the implications of Darwinism for humans and human nature, tends to be a codeword for denial of Darwinism.
Darwinism, however, is true, for the same reasons as evolution is true, and, unlike "evolution", is not a codeword for a collection of pious politically correct beliefs. Hence Dawkins, despite his otherwise progressive beliefs, calls himself a Darwinist, not an evolutionist.
However any discussion of the difference between "evolution" and Darwinism would produce a mind killing response that makes the discussion of gender differences harmless by comparison.
Um, I'm completely unaware of any difference between evolution and Darwinism. Are you using the latter to mean "The theory of evolution is true, plus eugenics is desirable"?
Evolution was fairly popular (at least, in some places) before Darwin and arguably many modern people have a pre-Darwinian (teleological) understanding of the idea. Darwin's grandfather wrote poems about evolution before Charles was born, and some of his school mates were followers of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. There seem to be many people that wear "evolution" as attire (presumably to identify with some "educated", "scientific", or "secular" tribe), but that don't really understand natural selection or think it stopped operating on humans some tens-of-thousands of years ago.
"Common descent", "natural selection", and "speciation through reproductive separation" are distinct elements of evolutionary theory. The idea of common descent is a lot older than the idea that effectively all biodiversity stems from variable survival and reproduction, and the formation of isolated gene pools.
http://xkcd.com/263/ (read the tooltip text). (Anyway, didn't Ayn Rand use “A=A” or something like that as a slogan?)
Yeah, you are right. Somehow the level of "2+2=4" was skipped in political discourse (nobody argues against that, except some villains in Orwell's novel), but some people go more meta and deny that there is such thing as a correct answer or truth, etc.
In their case there is probably no bottom level where the education could start. Just like you can't educate rocks. It still can be worth educating the people who did not fall that deep.
The Soviet Union, during the first Five Year Plan, had the motto "two plus two equals five," meaning "we will achieve the five year plan in four years." Real totalitarians are nearly as creepy as the ones Orwell imagined.
Victor Hugo used 2+2=5 politically before Orwell. In Hugo's case, the dictator playing silly-buggers with the math was Napoleon.